Read it.

How about that Global Warming, eh? Rising seas nipping at your toes yet?

Read it.

The first operational U.S. “clean coal” plant could end up increasing carbon dioxide emissions, calling into question the hundreds of millions of dollars the Obama administration has spent on such projects.

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One of the things that Streep, who spoke at the Democratic National Convention last summer in support of Hillary Clinton, didn’t address, though, is the way in which Barack Obama has handed Trump vast powers as president. There’s no question that Obama worked overtime to arrogate more power to the presidency over the past eight years, using all sorts of unilateral action to get shit done. Even Yellow Dog Democrats will grant as much when it comes to civil liberties abuses (remember Bam’s “secret kill list”?) and waging war (still waiting on his request to Congress under the War Powers Act to sanction Libya, which turned out so well). Obama was on the losing end of a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling about abusing recess-appointment powers and his moves on immigration law suffered a similar fate as well. In all sorts of ways, the plain fact is that, like George W. Bush before, Obama was ready to grab as much power as he could. And whatever presidential precedents he established will now be sitting in Oval Office, waiting for the arrival of Donald Trump.

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Taxpayers are spending $326,000 fixing the waterfront vacation home of a serial financial criminal and former Olympic gold medalist, which is nearly as much as the house was worth.

The boondoggle last year came courtesy of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) because Steven Riddick bought a home in Virginia too close to the water, leading to flooding, highlighting the agency’s often wasteful and inconsistent assistance programs.

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Anyone who thinks that, for all its flaws, at least the government is good at doing military stuff hasn’t been tracking the clown-car routines the Navy has been going through during the last fifty years (fifty years!).

When first forced to use the blue pattern camo work clothes back in 2010 U.S. Navy sailors thought their new work uniform was mainly silly. It consisted of shirt and pants in a gray, blue (mainly) and black camouflage pattern. Most sailors wear the work uniform while on a ship. What’s the point of camouflage there? This has at least led to some entertaining humor. For example, sailors called the new camouflage “Aquaflage” and tried to find some purpose in it. Some believed it was a safety measure, since if you fell overboard while wearing it there was little chance you’d ever be seen in the water, so there was no need to turn the ship around to try and find you. Along those lines, some believed that if you fell overboard, the aquaflage would make it more difficult for any sharks to spot you. Actually, sharks detect prey via smell, not sight, but no matter, it was better to laugh about this blue clothing nightmare rather that look hard and cry.

There was more to cry over. Aquaflage came along mainly because of the herd instinct at the top. Since 2001 all the services had gotten new camouflage uniforms, or gotten them for the first time. Even the air force had a blue type camouflage pattern. The admirals felt compelled to replace the traditional (and popular) dungarees and blue work shirt with the much less popular aquaflage. For more formal occasions, junior enlisted sailors were still allowed to wear a khaki shirt and black pants (an arrangement the U.S. Marine Corps has made famous). The navy “dress blues” remained unchanged.

After aquaflage was introduced the navy brass, bowing to loud and sustained complaints, agreed to allow sailors living off base, on their way home from work, to get out of their vehicles to perform short errands (picking up dry cleaning, groceries, day care, and so on), while wearing the new navy work uniform. Prior to this, navy personnel were forbidden from leaving their vehicles while outside the base if they were wearing the work uniform. While sailors appreciated being allowed to get out of their cars on the way home work, most would prefer to do it while wearing the traditional dungarees and blue work shirt rather than the cartoonish aquaflage.

Read it.

Most transit is oriented to downtown, a destination few people go to anymore. If you don’t want to go downtown, transit is practically useless.

In the Good Old Days, business was concentrated downtown for convenience — convenience in communications, convenience in supply, convenience in coordinating employees.

Nowadays, a lot of jobs don’t require you to be in any particular place, so long as you have a computer workstation and a fast Internet connection. UPS and FedEx and Stamps.Com mean you don’t need to be near a Post Office or transportation hub. More and more companies are locating their offices in suburbs, which are closer to where people actually live; ‘where are you located’ is the first question I used to ask of places where I was considering working.

John Hinderaker points and laughs.

I wrote about the Trump hate-fest at the Golden Globes last night while the show was in progress, based on a news account. (I would rather get a root canal than watch a Hollywood awards program.) Subsequent to my post, Meryl Streep went completely over the top with Trump Derangement Syndrome, for which she has been appropriately bashed non-stop for the last 20-odd hours. Still, crazy as Streep’s screed was, I am not sure she topped Hugh Laurie’s claim that he won his award “at the last ever Golden Globes.” Did he mean to suggest that President Trump will somehow decree an end to Hollywood awards shows? Not even Trump’s biggest fans are that optimistic.

Read it.

Many thousands of women are expected to converge on the nation’s capital for the Women’s March on Washington the day after Donald J. Trump’s inauguration. Jennifer Willis no longer plans to be one of them.

Ms. Willis, a 50-year-old wedding minister from South Carolina, had looked forward to taking her daughters to the march. Then she read a post on the Facebook page for the march that made her feel unwelcome because she is white.

The post, written by a black activist from Brooklyn who is a march volunteer, advised “white allies” to listen more and talk less. It also chided those who, it said, were only now waking up to racism because of the election.

“You don’t just get to join because now you’re scared, too,” read the post. “I was born scared.”

Stung by the tone, Ms. Willis canceled her trip.

‘Scorecard! Getcher scorecard here! Ya can’t tell the victims without a scorecard!’

Pass the popcorn.

Read it.

How about that Global Warming, eh? Rising sea livels nipping at your toes yet?

Read it.

How about that Global Warming, eh? Rising sea levels drowned Manhattan yet? (Or ANYWHERE?)

Read it.

Under the rules from the National Marine Fisheries Service, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, companies would have to prove where each fish or cut of meat came from, down to the ship that caught it or the farm that raised it. Fish sellers would be required to show the origin for 13 of the most popular fish species — including most types of tuna fish, crabs and cod — and when the seafood arrived at U.S. customs stations.

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Canada, if you can believe it. No wonder Hollywood keeps pretending to want to move there.

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The Washington Post reports that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is under pressure over the poor record of congressional Democrats with regard to minority hiring. In response, Schumer reportedly will urge his fellow Democrats to adopt the Rooney Rule, which requires NFL teams to interview at least one minority applicant for top positions.

Thus, whereas Sessions years ago hired an African-American as his top counsel, Schumer is now trying to get Democrats to interview African-American candidates.

Read it.

“Apparently, the man had made a grilled-cheese sandwich and either the wife or the daughter, we’re not exactly sure who, but somebody, one of the females in the house, took a bite of his sandwich, and apparently, that enraged him to the point that he fired shots in the house,” Cpl. Shawn Vinson of the Baltimore County Police told said.

Blue state blues.

Avik Roy does the heavy lifting.

• The proposal contained herein—the “Universal Exchange Plan” (UEP)—seeks to substantially repair both sets of health-policy problems: those caused by the ACA and those that predate it; the UEP’s reforms are also perfectly compatible with the “repeal and replace” approach, but they do not require the full and formal repeal of the ACA in order to be enacted.
• The UEP would, by 2025, increase the number of U.S. residents with health coverage by 12.1 million, relative to the ACA; beyond 2025, the UEP would outperform the ACA by an even wider margin.
• The UEP would also: expand economic opportunity for those struggling with high medical bills, improve the quality of health care delivered to the poor, and put America’s finances on a permanently stable course.

Read it.

Don’t you just love that government-provided health care?

Don’t you just wish we had a system like that in America?

Watch it.

You might have been under the impression that the Golden Globes was about theatrical performances, but you would be wrong: It’s about Donald Trump. (What isn’t, these days?)

This is why Trump keeps winning: He’s living (rent-free) in every Leftist head.

Read it.

And about time, too.

Fast Company publishes a story on how to lead that focuses on three women and a kind-of-black guy, thereby showing that following their advice will not result in heading a major corporation, most of whom are bossed by people who are white and male.

Karli Kloss is pretty hot, though; I predict success for her, although I suspect that leadership won’t have a lot to do with it.

Tyler Cowen, a Real Economist, takes a gander.

Overall, I don’t see why the federal government needs to own about 28% of the country.  Nonetheless, in the meantime the government does allow grazing and mining to take place on those lands, often at below-market rents.  (By the way, for now I am putting on hold a possible #6: “federal land ownership is the most efficient way to regulate mining and fossil fuel extraction.”  It raises issues far beyond the scope of the current discussion, though it is significant.)

Joel Kotkin makes some observations.

In 1949 the historian Carey McWilliams defined California as the “the Great Exception” — a place so different from the rest of America as to seem almost a separate country. In the ensuing half-century, the Golden State became not so much exceptional but predictive of the rest of the nation: California’s approaches to public education, the environment, politics, community-building and lifestyle often became national standards, and even normative.

More’s the pity.

Ironically, the state’s policies, which place strong controls on development, road construction, and energy production and usage, are somewhat symbolic; by dint largely of its mild climate, the state is already far more energy efficient than the rest of the country.  But to achieve its ambitious new goals,  most serious observers suggest, the state would lose at least 100,000 jobs and further boost energy prices — which  disproportionately affect the poorer residents who predominate in the state’s beleaguered, and less temperate, interior.

The impact of these policies would be far-reaching. They have already reduced outside investment in manufacturing to minuscule levels and could cost California households an average of $3,000 annually. Such economic realities no longer influence many California policymakers but they could prove a boon  to other   states, notably Texas, Arizona and Nevada, which make a sport of hunting down California employers.

Eventually Caliornia will find out what failed states such as those in Eastern Europe found out before them: The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

According to the most recent Social Science Research Council report, the state overall suffers the greatest levels of income inequality in the nation; the Public Policy Institute places the gap well over 10 percent higher than the national average.

Isn’t it funny that the most Democrat places in the country — New York, California — are also the poster children for ‘income inequality’? I wonder why that is? Hmm, let me think….

Read it.

A popular New York City restaurant is closing its doors after 25 years because of what the owners call a stifling regulatory environment that treats the restaurant as a “cash machine.”

China Fun, a Chinese restaurant in Manhattan, announced its Jan. 3 closure because of increases in minimum wage and a city atmosphere that treats “mom-and-pop” eateries like cash cows to pay for all the ills of society, Albert Wu, told reporters. Wu is a representative of China Fun.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

There’s a myth that Americans have some kind of irrational love affair with their cars, and they don’t ride transit because of that irrationality. In fact, there are very good reasons why autos provide well over 95 percent of mechanized travel in urban areas while transit provides less than two percent.

One of the most important reasons is that transit is slow. According to the American Public Transportation Association’s Public Transportation Fact Book, the average speed of rail transit is 21.5 miles per hour, while the average speed of bus transit is 14.1 mph (see page 7). So-called rapid transit, known to the Federal Transit Administration as heavy rail, averages just 21.1 mph, while light rail is 15.6 mph and streetcars are a pathetic 7.7 mph (see page 40).

Public transit takes you from where you aren’t to where you don’t want to be at a time inconvenient for you in the company of people whom you’d normally pay money to avoid.

And it takes between two and three times longer than driving.

Read it.

Racism, pure and simple.

Sir Roger Scruton, the philosopher, said the demands suggest “ignorance”. “You can’t rule out a whole area of intellectual endeavour without having investigated it and clearly they haven’t investigated what they mean by white philosophy,” he told The Mail on Sunday.

“If they think there is a colonial context from which Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason arose, I would like to hear it.’

Read it. And watch the video.

As you might have heard, Obama is building a wall around his upscale rental in D.C.’s Kalorama neighborhood.

The video doesn’t appear to work for me — much like Obama, come to think of it.

Read it.

Which is not the same as what the DemLegHump Media is willing to report.

Read it.

Thousands of Obama loyalists are struggling to find work in a city now dominated by the GOP, according to a report from Politico. “It feels like there are just thousands of us trying to find a job, and there are no jobs,” Mira Patel, a longtime Clinton aide told Politico.

And whose fault is that? Welcome to our world, bitches.

Greg Ip takes notice.

The new nationalist surge has startled establishment parties in part because they don’t see globalism as an ideology. How could it be, when it is shared across the traditional left-right spectrum by the likes of Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair, George W. Bush and David Cameron?

But globalism is an ideology, and its struggle with nationalism will shape the coming era much as the struggle between conservatives and liberals has shaped the last. That, at least, is how the new nationalists see it. After successfully pressuring Carrier Corp. to keep in Indiana about half of the 2,100 jobs that the firm had planned to move to Mexico, Mr. Trump told a rally last month, “There is no global anthem, no global currency, no certificate of global citizenship. From now on, it’s going to be ‘America First.’ ”

Read it.

I always wondered why, when Harrison Ford went on to become a huge star and even Carrie Fisher managed to find work, Mark Hamil just sat on his butt and did nothing of note.

Now we see that he really was just useless all along.

Read it.

An “exceptional” British student has died after reportedly plunging to his death from a high-rise building in Tokyo on New Year’s Eve following an evening spent drinking with friends.

I can certainly believe that he was exceptionally foolish.

Justin Browning, 21, a third year student at Durham University, was spending a year studying at the Waseda University in Tokyo as part of his history degree when the tragedy occurred.

Oh, I think ‘tragedy’ a bit strong — think of it as evolution in action. Natural selection works even when you might not want it to.

Read it.

You can’t make this shit up.

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When a Palestinian terrorist drove a truck into a crowd of Israeli soldiers Sunday morning the headlines from major media outlets pinned the blame squarely on the truck, avoiding headlining the story as a terrorist attack.

We need background checks for truck drivers. (Will the truckophobia never cease?)

And maybe for journalists, too.

Read it.

Hentoff was less likely to be called a liberal later in life. That’s partly because his brand of free-speech absolutism was growing less common on the left, and it’s partly because of his heterodoxy on abortion. (Hentoff was pro-life, arguing against abortion on the same grounds that he argued against capital punishment and war. Or, at least, against some wars—he eventually rended his seamless garment to support interventions in Rwanda and Iraq.) But you couldn’t really cast him as a man of the right either: Besides his intense distrust for the police agencies that conservatives tend to revere, he was a longtime democratic socialist who held onto a lot of his leftist economic ideas in old age. It’s not even quite right to call him an ACLU liberal, because he kept butting heads with the ACLU. (The nation’s most prominent civil libertarian organization wasn’t always civil libertarian enough for him.) Best to think of him as his own man, with at least a couple of views to offend pretty much anyone.

Read it.

While I agree that the Federal Reserve today has a comparative advantage at supplying currency to the global economy, I disagree that this reality is bad for Americans.  In fact, it’s good for Americans – very good.  The reason is that we receive from foreigners a steady flow of valuable goods and services in exchange for inexpensive monochrome portraits of dead American statesmen (or their even-less-costly-to-produce digital equivalents).

I am reminded of a scene in the third Jason Bourne movie, where Bourne is in Moscow and needs to go to the address of the daughter of the couple he killed in his first job. He shows up at a cab rank and asks if anyone can take him to the address that he shows them. Sceptical faces all around. Finally one says, ‘Rubles?’ and Bourne answers ‘Dollars.’ Suddenly all is smiles, and they’re on their way.

American Presidents have power, even after they’re dead.

Read it.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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Five years ago, I stood before several thousand mostly native Japanese speakers and addressed them in English. From now on, I told them, Rakuten – Japan’s largest online marketplace, of which I am the chief executive officer – would conduct all of its business, from official meetings to internal e-mail, in English. I still remember the shocked expressions on the listeners’ faces.

Read it.

A radical left-wing activist who attends the University of California, Berkeley is the prime suspect in a fatal stabbing, and all one of his friends cares about is that he’s labeled by his preferred pronoun in news articles covering the crime.

The man-bun really pulls its look together.

Gomez, who lists his major on Facebook as Chicanx/Latinx Studies, is active in numerous progressive and leftist causes at Berkeley.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

The OFloinn takes a look.

On the visceral level, the casual TV viewer on the evening news — and this is most viewers — is left with only the vague impression of Democratic leadership gathered around a poorly-designed sign reading “Make America Sick Again.” This is a heck of a motto with which to associate one’s party. It is only in the fine print that one sees that they blame the Republicans for doing this; but who reads the fine print in a 15-second sound bite on the evening news? As an ad slogan even a neophyte on Madison Ave. could come up with something ten times better.

On the rational level, the ad’s failure is worse. People do not get sick because they lack health insurance. They get sick because they contract diseases or suffer injuries. The lack of insurance affects the ability to pay for the care, but that is a different problem.  In fact, a major reason why many people had foregone insurance in the past was that, being young and healthy, they saw no need for the expense. That did not account for all of the uninsured, but it was a big chunk of them. Nor is it true that Americans were especially sick before the Obama administration determined to subsidize the insurance industry.

I can’t wait to hear Scott Adams’ take on this.

Read it.

I wouldn’t have thought it possible to ‘ruin’ something that tastes as bad as coffee, but apparently I was wrong.

Read it.

Perhaps that’s why they don’t have an immigration problem.

Mark Steyn observes.

I spent much of Friday behind the Golden EIB Microphone, guest-hosting for Rush on America’s Number One radio show. An hour into the broadcast, a gunman shot up the baggage claim area of Terminal 2 at Fort Lauderdale Airport, and the death toll rose throughout the remainder of the show. Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, announced that the shooter was a man called Esteban Santiago – which necessitated the deployment of the phrase “white hispanic”, last heard of from The New York Times as a convenient way to corral George Zimmerman into the “white supremacist” camp. He doesn’t look that “white” in the photograph at right, but maybe that’s just the lighting.

The Telesteps Ladder.

Roof Snow De-Icing Cables. It’s that time of year.

Read it.

Maybe the picture is bogus — who knows? But if it isn’t, Mr. Santiago-Ruiz is definitely a convert to Islam, because he is making the unmistakable and notorious gang sign for the Islamic State: a single index finger pointing upwards, representing tawhid, the oneness of Allah.

There’s also a rumor floating around that he lived within walking distance of the only mosque in Alaska.

This is very much a breaking story, so I’m sure much more will be unfolding in the next few hours. I’m waiting to learn his Muslim name, which is bound to emerge sooner or later.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

I do.

I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.

Read it.

Yet another corrupt black Democrat. It’s hard to keep them all straight.

Read it.

Obviously Princess Leia’s death hit him very hard.